"Oh, Merrylips!" cried Pug, in her soft voice, and caught up the doll and cuddled it to her breast. "'Tis so sweet a baby! Look, Puss! It hath a whisket of lawn, and the under-petticoat, 'tis of fair brocade."
"A mammet—a girl's toy!" repeated Merrylips, and stamped her foot. "My godmother shall not send me such. I will not be a girl. I'll be a lad."
"Well said! And so thou shalt, if wishing will do't, my bawcock!" laughed Sir Thomas.
But Lady Venner looked on in silence, and her face was grave.
CHAPTER II
HER BIRTHDAY
Gentle Pug took the doll, and, in the moments when she was not setting neat stitches or baking custards, played with it prettily. Meantime Merrylips went romping her own way, and soon had forgotten both the doll and the godmother that had sent it.
This godmother Merrylips knew only by name, as the Lady Sybil Fernefould, her mother's old friend, a dread and distant being to whom, in her mother's letters, she was trained to send her duty. She had never seen Lady Sybil, nor, after the gift of the doll, did she wish to see her.
Through the summer days that followed Merrylips was busy with matters of deeper interest than dolls and godmothers. She rode on the great wains, loaded with corn, that lumbered behind the straining horses to the barns of Walsover. She helped to gather fruit—plums and pears and rosy apples. She watched her father's men, while they thrashed the rye and wheat or made cider and perry. She shaped a little mill-wheel with the four-penny whittle that Munn, true to his promise, at last had sent her, and set it turning in the brook below the paddock.
Almost in a day, it seemed to her, the time slipped by, till it was two months and more since she had been so angry at her godmother's gift. Michaelmas tide was near, and by a happy chance all three of her tall brothers were home from Winchester School and from college at Oxford.